Tag Archives: Security

Google Play Protect detects Potentially Harmful Applications (PHAs) which Google Play Protect defines as any mobile app that poses a potential security risk to users or to user data—commonly referred to as "malware." in a variety of ways, such as static analysis, dynamic analysis, and machine learning. While our systems are great at automatically detecting and protecting against PHAs, we believe the best security comes from the combination of automated scanning and skilled human review. With this blog series we will be sharing our research analysis with the research and broader security community, starting with the PHA family, Zen. Zen uses root permissions on a device to automatically enable a service that creates fake Google accounts. These accounts are created by abusing accessibility services. Zen apps gain access to root permissions from a rooting trojan in its infection chain. In this blog post, we do not differentiate between the rooting component and the component that abuses root: we refer to them interchangeably as Zen. We also describe apps that we think are coming from the same author or a group of authors. All of the PHAs that are mentioned in this blog post were detected and removed by Google Play Protect.

Background

Uncovering PHAs takes a lot of detective work and unraveling the mystery of how they're possibly connected to other apps takes even more. PHA authors usually try to hide their tracks, so attribution is difficult. Sometimes, we can attribute different apps to the same author based on small, unique pieces of evidence that suggest similarity, such as a repetition of an exceptionally rare code snippet, asset, or a particular string in the debug logs. Every once in a while, authors leave behind a trace that allows us to attribute not only similar apps, but also multiple different PHA families to the same group or person. However, the actual timeline of the creation of different variants is unclear. In April 2013, we saw the first sample, which made heavy use of dynamic code loading (i.e., fetching executable code from remote sources after the initial app is installed). Dynamic code loading makes it impossible to state what kind of PHA it was. This sample displayed ads from various sources. More recent variants blend rooting capabilities and click fraud. As rooting exploits on Android become less prevalent and lucrative, PHA authors adapt their abuse or monetization strategy to focus on tactics like click fraud. This post doesn't follow the chronological evolution of Zen, but instead covers relevant samples from least to most complex.

Apps with a custom-made advertisement SDK

The simplest PHA from the author's portfolio used a specially crafted advertisement SDK to create a proxy for all ads-related network traffic. By proxying all requests through a custom server, the real source of ads is opaque. This example shows one possible implementation of this technique. This approach allows the authors to combine ads from third-party advertising networks with ads they created for their own apps. It may even allow them to sell ad space directly to application developers. The advertisement SDK also collects statistics about clicks and impressions to make it easier to track revenue. Selling the ad traffic directly or displaying ads from other sources in a very large volume can provide direct profit to the app author from the advertisers. We have seen two types of apps that use this custom-made SDK. The first are games of very low quality that mimic the experience of popular mobile games. While the counterfeit games claim to provide similar functionality to the popular apps, they are simply used to display ads through a custom advertisement SDK. The second type of apps reveals an evolution in the author's tactics. Instead of implementing very basic gameplay, the authors pirated and repackaged the original game in their app and bundled with it their advertisement SDK. The only noticeable difference is the game has more ads, including ads on the very first screen. In all cases, the ads are used to convince users to install other apps from different developer accounts, but written by the same group. Those apps use the same techniques to monetize their actions.

Click fraud apps

The authors' tactics evolved from advertisement spam to real PHA (Click Fraud). Click fraud PHAs simulate user clicks on ads instead of simply displaying ads and waiting for users to click them. This allows the PHA authors to monetize their apps more effectively than through regular advertising. This behavior negatively impacts advertisement networks and their clients because advertising budget is spent without acquiring real customers, and impacts user experience by consuming their data plan resources. The click fraud PHA requests a URL to the advertising network directly instead of proxying it through an additional SDK. The command & control server (C&C server) returns the URL to click along with a very long list of additional parameters in JSON format. After rendering the ad on the screen, the app tries to identify the part of the advertisement website to click. If that part is found, the app loads Javascript snippets from the JSON parameters to click a button or other HTML element, simulating a real user click. Because a user interacting with an ad often leads to a higher chance of the user purchasing something, ad networks often "pay per click" to developers who host their ads. Therefore, by simulating fraudulent clicks, these developers are making money without requiring a user to click on an advertisement. This example code shows a JSON reply returned by the C&C server. It has been shortened for brevity.

Based on this JSON reply, the app looks for an HTML snippet that corresponds to the active element (show_hide btnnext) and, if found, the Javascript snippet tries to perform a click() method on it.

Rooting trojans

The Zen authors have also created a rooting trojan. Using a publicly available rooting framework, the PHA attempts to root devices and gain persistence on them by reinstalling itself on the system partition of rooted device. Installing apps on the system partition makes it harder for the user to remove the app. This technique only works for unpatched devices running Android 4.3 or lower. Devices running Android 4.4 and higher are protected by Verified Boot. Zen's rooting trojan apps target a specific device model with a very specific system image. After achieving root access the app tries to replace the framework.jar file on the system partition. Replicating framework.jar allows the app to intercept and modify the behavior of the Android standard API. In particular, these apps try to add an additional method called statistics() into the Activity class. When inserted, this method runs every time any Activity object in any Android app is created. This happens all the time in regular Android apps, as Activity is one of the fundamental Android UI elements. The only purpose of this method is to connect to the C&C server.

The Zen trojan

After achieving persistence, the trojan downloads additional payloads, including another trojan called Zen. Zen requires root to work correctly on the Android operating system. The Zen trojan uses its root privileges to turn on accessibility service (a service used to allow Android users with disabilities to use their devices) for itself by writing to a system-wide setting value enabled_accessibility_services. Zen doesn't even check for the root privilege: it just assumes it has it. This leads us to believe that Zen is just part of a larger infection chain. The trojan implements three accessibility services directed at different Android API levels and uses these accessibility services, chosen by checking the operating system version, to create new Google accounts. This is done by opening the Google account creation process and parsing the current view. The app then clicks the appropriate buttons, scrollbars, and other UI elements to go through account sign-up without user intervention. During the account sign-up process, Google may flag the account creation attempt as suspicious and prompt the app to solve a CAPTCHA. To get around this, the app then uses its root privilege to inject code into the Setup Wizard, extract the CAPTCHA image, and sends it to a remote server to try to solve the CAPTCHA. It is unclear if the remote server is capable of solving the CAPTCHA image automatically or if this is done manually by a human in the background. After the server returns the solution, the app enters it into the appropriate text field to complete the CAPTCHA challenge. The Zen trojan does not implement any kind of obfuscation except for one string that is encoded using Base64 encoding. It's one of the strings - "How you'll sign in" - that it looks for during the account creation process. The code snippet below shows part of the screen parsing process.

Apart from injecting code to read the CAPTCHA, the app also injects its own code into the system_server process, which requires root privileges. This indicates that the app tries to hide itself from any anti-PHA systems that look for a specific app process name or does not have the ability to scan the memory of the system_server process. The app also creates hooks to prevent the phone from rebooting, going to sleep or allowing the user from pressing hardware buttons during the account creation process. These hooks are created using the root access and a custom native code called Lmt_INJECT, although the algorithm for this is well known. First, the app has to turn off SELinux protection. Then the app finds a process id value for the process it wants to inject with code. This is done using a series of syscalls as outlined below. The "source process" refers to the Zen trojan running as root, while the "target process" refers to the process to which the code is injected and [pid] refers to the target process pid value.

The source process checks the mapping between a process id and a process name. This is done by reading the /proc/[pid]/cmdline file.This very first step fails in Android 7.0 and higher, even with a root permission. The /proc filesystem is now mounted with a hidepid=2 parameter, which means that the process cannot access other process /proc/[pid] directory.

A ptrace_attach syscall is called. This allows the source process to trace the target.

The source process looks at its own memory to calculate the offset between the beginning of the libc library and the mmap address.

The source process reads /proc/[pid]/maps to find where libc is located in the target process memory. By adding the previously calculated offset, it can get the address of the mmap function in the target process memory.

The source process tries to determine the location of dlopen, dlsym, and dlclose functions in the target process. It uses the same technique as it used to determine the offset to the mmap function.

The source process writes the native shellcode into the memory region allocated by mmap. Additionally, it also writes addresses of dlopen, dlsym, and dlclose into the same region, so that they can be used by the shellcode. Shellcode simply uses dlopen to open a .so file within the target process and then dlsym to find a symbol in that file and run it.

The source process changes the registers in the target process so that PC register points directly to the shellcode. This is done using the ptrace syscall.

This diagram illustrates the whole process.

Summary

PHA authors go to great lengths to come up with increasingly clever ways to monetize their apps. Zen family PHA authors exhibit a wide range of techniques, from simply inserting an advertising SDK to a sophisticated trojan. The app that resulted in the largest number of affected users was the click fraud version, which was installed over 170,000 times at its peak in February 2018. The most affected countries were India, Brazil, and Indonesia. In most cases, these click fraud apps were uninstalled by the users, probably due to the low quality of the apps. If Google Play Protect detects one of these apps, Google Play Protect will show a warning to users. We are constantly on the lookout for new threats and we are expanding our protections. Every device with Google Play includes Google Play Protect and all apps on Google Play are automatically and periodically scanned by our solutions.

Cross-posted on the Google Security Blog.Open source software (OSS) is extremely important to Google, and we rely on OSS in a variety of customer-facing and internal projects. We also understand the difficulty and importance of securing the open source ecosystem, and are continuously looking for ways to simplify it.

For the OSS community, we currently provide OSS-Fuzz, a free continuous fuzzing infrastructure hosted on the Google Cloud Platform. OSS-Fuzz uncovers security vulnerabilities and stability issues, and reports them directly to developers. Since launching in December 2016, OSS-Fuzz has reported over 9,000 bugs directly to open source developers.

In addition to OSS-Fuzz, Google's security team maintains several internal tools for identifying bugs in both Google internal and open source code. Until recently, these issues were manually reported to various public bug trackers by our security team and then monitored until they were resolved. Unresolved bugs were eligible for the Patch Rewards Program. While this reporting process had some success, it was overly complex. Now, by unifying and automating our fuzzing tools, we have been able to consolidate our processes into a single workflow, based on OSS-Fuzz. Projects integrated with OSS-Fuzz will benefit from being reviewed by both our internal and external fuzzing tools, thereby increasing code coverage and discovering bugs faster.

We are committed to helping open source projects benefit from integrating with our OSS-Fuzz fuzzing infrastructure. In the coming weeks, we will reach out via email to critical projects that we believe would be a good fit and support the community at large. Projects that integrate are eligible for rewards ranging from $1,000 (initial integration) up to $20,000 (ideal integration); more details are available here. These rewards are intended to help offset the cost and effort required to properly configure fuzzing for OSS projects. If you would like to integrate your project with OSS-Fuzz, please submit your project for review. Our goal is to admit as many OSS projects as possible and ensure that they are continuously fuzzed.

Once contacted, we might provide a sample fuzz target to you for easy integration. Many of these fuzz targets are generated with new technology that understands how library APIs are used appropriately. Watch this space for more details on how Google plans to further automate fuzz target creation, so that even more open source projects can benefit from continuous fuzzing.

Thank you for your continued contributions to the open source community. Let’s work together on a more secure and stable future for open source software.

Google Public DNS is the world’s largest public Domain Name Service (DNS) recursive resolver, allowing anyone to convert Internet domain names like www.example.com into Internet addresses needed by an email application or web browser. Just as your search queries can expose sensitive information, the domains you lookup via DNS can also be sensitive. Starting today, users can secure queries between their devices and Google Public DNS with DNS-over-TLS, preserving their privacy and integrity.

The DNS environment has changed for the better since we launched Google Public DNS over eight years ago. Back then, as today, part of Google Public DNS’ mission has been to improve the security and accuracy of DNS for users all over the world. But today, there is an increased awareness of the need to protect users’ communication with their DNS resolvers against forged responses and safeguard their privacy from network surveillance. The DNS-over-TLS protocol specifies a standard way to provide security and privacy for DNS traffic between users and their resolvers. Now users can secure their connections to Google Public DNS with TLS, the same technology that protects their HTTPS web connections.

We implemented the DNS-over-TLS specification along with the RFC 7766 recommendations to minimize the overhead of using TLS. These include support for TLS 1.3 (for faster connections and improved security), TCP fast open, and pipelining of multiple queries and out-of-order responses over a single connection. All of this is deployed with Google’s serving infrastructure which provides reliable and scalable management for DNS-over-TLS connections.

Use DNS-over-TLS todayAndroid 9 (Pie) device users can use DNS-over-TLS today. For configuration instructions for Android and other systems, please see the documentation. Advanced Linux users can use the stubby resolver from dnsprivacy.org to talk to Google’s DNS-over-TLS service.

There is no better time to talk about Android dessert releases than the holidays because who doesn't love dessert? And what is one of our favorite desserts during the holiday season? Well, pie of course.

In all seriousness, pie is a great analogy because of how the various ingredients turn into multiple layers of goodness: right from the software crust on top to the hardware layer at the bottom. Read on for a summary of security and privacy features introduced in Android Pie this year.Platform hardeningWith Android Pie, we updated File-Based Encryption to support external storage media (such as, expandable storage cards). We also introduced support for metadata encryption where hardware support is present. With filesystem metadata encryption, a single key present at boot time encrypts whatever content is not encrypted by file-based encryption (such as, directory layouts, file sizes, permissions, and creation/modification times).

Android Pie also introduced a BiometricPrompt API that apps can use to provide biometric authentication dialogs (such as, fingerprint prompt) on a device in a modality-agnostic fashion. This functionality creates a standardized look, feel, and placement for the dialog. This kind of standardization gives users more confidence that they're authenticating against a trusted biometric credential checker.

Control Flow Integrity (CFI) is a security mechanism that disallows changes to the original control flow graph of compiled code. In Android Pie, it has been enabled by default within the media frameworks and other security-critical components, such as for Near Field Communication (NFC) and Bluetooth protocols. We also implemented support for CFI in the Android common kernel, continuing our efforts to harden the kernel in previous Android releases.

Integer Overflow Sanitization is a security technique used to mitigate memory corruption and information disclosure vulnerabilities caused by integer operations. We've expanded our use of Integer Overflow sanitizers by enabling their use in libraries where complex untrusted input is processed or where security vulnerabilities have been reported.Continued investment in hardware-backed security

One of the highlights of Android Pie is Android Protected Confirmation, the first major mobile OS API that leverages a hardware-protected user interface (Trusted UI) to perform critical transactions completely outside the main mobile operating system. Developers can use this API to display a trusted UI prompt to the user, requesting approval via a physical protected input (such as, a button on the device). The resulting cryptographically signed statement allows the relying party to reaffirm that the user would like to complete a sensitive transaction through their app.

We also introduced support for a new Keystore type that provides stronger protection for private keys by leveraging tamper-resistant hardware with dedicated CPU, RAM, and flash memory. StrongBox Keymaster is an implementation of the Keymaster hardware abstraction layer (HAL) that resides in a hardware security module. This module is designed and required to have its own processor, secure storage, True Random Number Generator (TRNG), side-channel resistance, and tamper-resistant packaging.

Other Keystore features (as part of Keymaster 4) include Keyguard-bound keys, Secure Key Import, 3DES support, and version binding. Keyguard-bound keys enable use restriction so as to protect sensitive information. Secure Key Import facilitates secure key use while protecting key material from the application or operating system. You can read more about these features in our recent blog post as well as the accompanying release notes.Enhancing user privacy

User privacy has been boosted with several behavior changes, such as limiting the access background apps have to the camera, microphone, and device sensors. New permission rules and permission groups have been created for phone calls, phone state, and Wi-Fi scans, as well as restrictions around information retrieved from Wi-Fi scans. We have also added associated MAC address randomization, so that a device can use a different network address when connecting to a Wi-Fi network.

On top of that, Android Pie added support for encrypting Android backups with the user's screen lock secret (that is, PIN, pattern, or password). By design, this means that an attacker would not be able to access a user's backed-up application data without specifically knowing their passcode. Auto backup for apps has been enhanced by providing developers a way to specify conditions under which their app's data is excluded from auto backup. For example, Android Pie introduces a new flag to determine whether a user's backup is client-side encrypted.

As part of a larger effort to move all web traffic away from cleartext (unencrypted HTTP) and towards being secured with TLS (HTTPS), we changed the defaults for Network Security Configuration to block all cleartext traffic. We're protecting users with TLS by default, unless you explicitly opt-in to cleartext for specific domains. Android Pie also adds built-in support for DNS over TLS, automatically upgrading DNS queries to TLS if a network's DNS server supports it. This protects information about IP addresses visited from being sniffed or intercepted on the network level.

We believe that the features described in this post advance the security and privacy posture of Android, but you don't have to take our word for it. Year after year our continued efforts are demonstrably resulting in better protection as evidenced by increasing exploit difficulty and independent mobile security ratings. Now go and enjoy some actual pie while we get back to preparing the next Android dessert release!

Making Android more secure requires a combination of hardening the platform and advancing anti-exploitation techniques.

There is no better time to talk about Android dessert releases than the holidays because who doesn't love dessert? And what is one of our favorite desserts during the holiday season? Well, pie of course.

In all seriousness, pie is a great analogy because of how the various ingredients turn into multiple layers of goodness: right from the software crust on top to the hardware layer at the bottom. Read on for a summary of security and privacy features introduced in Android Pie this year.

Strengthening Android

Making Android more secure requires a combination of hardening the platform and advancing anti-exploitation techniques.

Platform hardening

With Android Pie, we updated File-Based Encryption to support external storage media (such as, expandable storage cards). We also introduced support for metadata encryption where hardware support is present. With filesystem metadata encryption, a single key present at boot time encrypts whatever content is not encrypted by file-based encryption (such as, directory layouts, file sizes, permissions, and creation/modification times).

Android Pie also introduced a BiometricPrompt API that apps can use to provide biometric authentication dialogs (such as, fingerprint prompt) on a device in a modality-agnostic fashion. This functionality creates a standardized look, feel, and placement for the dialog. This kind of standardization gives users more confidence that they're authenticating against a trusted biometric credential checker.

New protections and test cases for the Application Sandbox help ensure all non-privileged apps targeting Android Pie (and all future releases of Android) run in stronger SELinux sandboxes. By providing per-app cryptographic authentication to the sandbox, this protection improves app separation, prevents overriding safe defaults, and (most significantly) prevents apps from making their data widely accessible.

Anti-exploitation improvements

Control Flow Integrity (CFI) is a security mechanism that disallows changes to the original control flow graph of compiled code. In Android Pie, it has been enabled by default within the media frameworks and other security-critical components, such as for Near Field Communication (NFC) and Bluetooth protocols. We also implemented support for CFI in the Android common kernel, continuing our efforts to harden the kernel in previous Android releases.

Integer Overflow Sanitization is a security technique used to mitigate memory corruption and information disclosure vulnerabilities caused by integer operations. We've expanded our use of Integer Overflow sanitizers by enabling their use in libraries where complex untrusted input is processed or where security vulnerabilities have been reported.

Continued investment in hardware-backed security

One of the highlights of Android Pie is Android Protected Confirmation, the first major mobile OS API that leverages a hardware-protected user interface (Trusted UI) to perform critical transactions completely outside the main mobile operating system. Developers can use this API to display a trusted UI prompt to the user, requesting approval via a physical protected input (such as, a button on the device). The resulting cryptographically signed statement allows the relying party to reaffirm that the user would like to complete a sensitive transaction through their app.

We also introduced support for a new Keystore type that provides stronger protection for private keys by leveraging tamper-resistant hardware with dedicated CPU, RAM, and flash memory. StrongBox Keymaster is an implementation of the Keymaster hardware abstraction layer (HAL) that resides in a hardware security module. This module is designed and required to have its own processor, secure storage, True Random Number Generator (TRNG), side-channel resistance, and tamper-resistant packaging.

Other Keystore features (as part of Keymaster 4) include Keyguard-bound keys, Secure Key Import, 3DES support, and version binding. Keyguard-bound keys enable use restriction so as to protect sensitive information. Secure Key Import facilitates secure key use while protecting key material from the application or operating system. You can read more about these features in our recent blog post as well as the accompanying release notes.

Enhancing user privacy

User privacy has been boosted with several behavior changes, such as limiting the access background apps have to the camera, microphone, and device sensors. New permission rules and permission groups have been created for phone calls, phone state, and Wi-Fi scans, as well as restrictions around information retrieved from Wi-Fi scans. We have also added associated MAC address randomization, so that a device can use a different network address when connecting to a Wi-Fi network.

On top of that, Android Pie added support for encrypting Android backups with the user's screen lock secret (that is, PIN, pattern, or password). By design, this means that an attacker would not be able to access a user's backed-up application data without specifically knowing their passcode. Auto backup for apps has been enhanced by providing developers a way to specify conditions under which their app's data is excluded from auto backup. For example, Android Pie introduces a new flag to determine whether a user's backup is client-side encrypted.

As part of a larger effort to move all web traffic away from cleartext (unencrypted HTTP) and towards being secured with TLS (HTTPS), we changed the defaults for Network Security Configuration to block all cleartext traffic. We're protecting users with TLS by default, unless you explicitly opt-in to cleartext for specific domains. Android Pie also adds built-in support for DNS over TLS, automatically upgrading DNS queries to TLS if a network's DNS server supports it. This protects information about IP addresses visited from being sniffed or intercepted on the network level.

We believe that the features described in this post advance the security and privacy posture of Android, but you don't have to take our word for it. Year after year our continued efforts are demonstrably resulting in better protection as evidenced by increasing exploit difficulty and independent mobile security ratings. Now go and enjoy some actual pie while we get back to preparing the next Android dessert release!

Posted by Brian Claire Young and Shawn Willden, Android Security; and Frank Salim, Google Pay[Cross-posted from the Android Developers Blog]

New Android Pie Keystore Features

The Android Keystore provides application developers with a set of cryptographic tools that are designed to secure their users' data. Keystore moves the cryptographic primitives available in software libraries out of the Android OS and into secure hardware. Keys are protected and used only within the secure hardware to protect application secrets from various forms of attacks. Keystore gives applications the ability to specify restrictions on how and when the keys can be used. Android Pie introduces new capabilities to Keystore. We will be discussing two of these new capabilities in this post. The first enables restrictions on key use so as to protect sensitive information. The second facilitates secure key use while protecting key material from the application or operating system.

Keyguard-bound keys

There are times when a mobile application receives data but doesn't need to immediately access it if the user is not currently using the device. Sensitive information sent to an application while the device screen is locked must remain secure until the user wants access to it. Android Pie addresses this by introducing keyguard-bound cryptographic keys. When the screen is locked, these keys can be used in encryption or verification operations, but are unavailable for decryption or signing. If the device is currently locked with a PIN, pattern, or password, any attempt to use these keys will result in an invalid operation. Keyguard-bound keys protect the user's data while the device is locked, and only available when the user needs it. Keyguard binding and authentication binding both function in similar ways, except with one important difference. Keyguard binding ties the availability of keys directly to the screen lock state while authentication binding uses a constant timeout. With keyguard binding, the keys become unavailable as soon as the device is locked and are only made available again when the user unlocks the device. It is worth noting that keyguard binding is enforced by the operating system, not the secure hardware. This is because the secure hardware has no way to know when the screen is locked. Hardware-enforced Android Keystore protection features like authentication binding, can be combined with keyguard binding for a higher level of security. Furthermore, since keyguard binding is an operating system feature, it's available to any device running Android Pie. Keys for any algorithm supported by the device can be keyguard-bound. To generate or import a key as keyguard-bound, call setUnlockedDeviceRequired(true) on the KeyGenParameterSpec or KeyProtection builder object at key generation or import.

Secure Key Import

Secure Key Import is a new feature in Android Pie that allows applications to provision existing keys into Keystore in a more secure manner. The origin of the key, a remote server that could be sitting in an on-premise data center or in the cloud, encrypts the secure key using a public wrapping key from the user's device. The encrypted key in the SecureKeyWrapper format, which also contains a description of the ways the imported key is allowed to be used, can only be decrypted in the Keystore hardware belonging to the specific device that generated the wrapping key. Keys are encrypted in transit and remain opaque to the application and operating system, meaning they're only available inside the secure hardware into which they are imported. Secure Key Import is useful in scenarios where an application intends to share a secret key with an Android device, but wants to prevent the key from being intercepted or from leaving the device. Google Pay uses Secure Key Import to provision some keys on Pixel 3 phones, to prevent the keys from being intercepted or extracted from memory. There are also a variety of enterprise use cases such as S/MIME encryption keys being recovered from a Certificate Authorities escrow so that the same key can be used to decrypt emails on multiple devices. To take advantage of this feature, please review this training article. Please note that Secure Key Import is a secure hardware feature, and is therefore only available on select Android Pie devices. To find out if the device supports it, applications can generate a KeyPair with PURPOSE_WRAP_KEY.

A few days ago, Fatih Ozkosemen and I led an episode of the AdSense On Air series. This program consists of monthly videos which cover many topics of interest to online publishers (we recommend you sign up if you use Google AdSense). The November 2018 version was dedicated to HTTPS migrations.

You can find the whole session, about one hour long, in this video:

The video covers the following topics:

What HTTPS encryption is, and why it is important to protect your visitors and yourself,

How HTTPS enables a more modern web,

What are the usual complaints about HTTPS, and are they still true today?

“But HTTPS certificates cost so much money!”

“But switching to HTTPS will destroy my SEO!”

“But “mixed content” is such a headache!”

“But my ad revenue will get destroyed!”

“But HTTPS is sooooo sloooow!"

Some practical advice to run the migration. Those are an aggregation of:

We hope that this sort of content is useful. Don’t hesitate to let us know if you like it and if we should do more! You can reach out to us directly on Twitter (Vincent & Fatih). Let us know which topics are of interest to you by commenting here or on the YouTube page. If you have questions when you plan your own HTTPS migration, don’t hesitate to ask in our Webmaster Help Forums.

Providing users with safe and secure experiences, while helping developers build and grow quality app businesses, is our top priority at Google Play. And we’re constantly working to improve our protections.

Google Play has been working to minimize app install attribution fraud for several years. In 2017 Google Play made available the Google Play Install Referrer API, which allows ad attribution providers, publishers and advertisers to determine which referrer was responsible for sending the user to Google Play for a given app install. This API was specifically designed to be resistant to install attribution fraud and we strongly encourage attribution providers, advertisers and publishers to insist on this standard of proof when measuring app install ads. Users, developers, advertisers and ad networks all benefit from a transparent, fair system.

We also take reports of questionable activity very seriously. If an app violates our Google Play Developer policies, we take action. That’s why we began our own independent investigation after we received reports of apps on Google Play accused of conducting app install attribution abuse by falsely claiming credit for newly installed apps to collect the download bounty from that app’s developer.

We now have an update regarding our ongoing investigation:

On Monday, we removed two apps from the Play Store because our investigation discovered evidence of app install attribution abuse.

We also discovered evidence of app install attribution abuse in 3 ad network SDKs. We have asked the impacted developers to remove those SDKs from their apps. Because we believe most of these developers were not aware of the behavior from these third-party SDKs, we have given them a short grace period to take action.

Google Ads SDKs were not utilized for any of the abusive behaviors mentioned above.

Our investigation is ongoing and additional reviews of other apps and third party SDKs are still underway. If we find evidence of additional policy violations, we will take action.

We will continue to investigate and improve our capabilities to better detect and protect against abusive behavior and the malicious actors behind them.

Customization is one of Android's greatest strengths. Android's open source nature has enabled thousands of device types that cover a variety of use cases. In addition to adding features to the Android Open Source Project, researchers, developers, service providers, and device and chipset manufacturers can make updates to improve Android security. Investing and engaging in academic research advances the state-of-the-art security techniques, contributes to science, and delivers cutting edge security and privacy features into the hands of end users. To foster more cooperative applied research between the Android Security and Privacy team and the wider academic and industrial community, we're launching ASPIRE (Android Security and PrIvacy REsearch).

ASPIRE's goal is encouraging the development of new security and privacy technology that impacts the Android ecosystem in the next 2 to 5 years, but isn't planned for mainline Android development. This timeframe extends beyond the next annual Android release to allow adequate time to analyze, develop, and stabilize research into features before including in the platform. To collaborate with security researchers, we're hosting events and creating more channels to contribute research.

On October 25th 2018, we invited top security and privacy researchers from around the world to present at Android Security Local Research Day (ASLR-D). At this event, external researchers and Android Security and Privacy team members discussed current issues and strategies that impact the future direction of security research—for Android and the entire industry.

We can't always get everyone in the same room and good ideas come from everywhere. So we're inviting all academic researchers to help us protect billions of users. Research collaborations with Android should be as straightforward as collaborating with the research lab next door. To get involved you can:

Posted by Elie Bursztein and Oxana Comanescu, Google Security and Privacy Group

We believe that cutting-edge research plays a key role in advancing the security and privacy of users across the Internet. While we do significant in-house research and engineering to protect users’ data, we maintain strong ties with academic institutions worldwide. We provide seed funding through faculty research grants, cloud credits to unlock new experiments, and foster active collaborations, including working with visiting scholars and research interns.

To accelerate the next generation of security and privacy breakthroughs, we recently created the Google Security and Privacy Research Awards program. These awards, selected via internal Google nominations and voting, recognize academic researchers who have made recent, significant contributions to the field.

We’ve been developing this program for several years. It began as a pilot when we awarded researchers for their work in 2016, and we expanded it more broadly for work from 2017. So far, we awarded $1 million dollars to 12 scholars. We are preparing the shortlist for 2018 nominees and will announce the winners next year. In the meantime, we wanted to highlight the previous award winners and the influence they’ve had on the field.2017 Awardees